Survivors Of Forgotten Holocaust, Remember

Lucy Derderian will be 100 years old on May 15.
Becoming a centegenarian would be quite a milestone for anyone, but in her case, its a miracle that she saw her 15th birthday.
Derderian was born in Yozgat, Turkey an Armenian, the ethnic group that the Turkish Ottoman Empire decided to eradicate from Turkey in 1915. They succeeded in murdering 1.5 million of them, including 80 members of Deredians family.
She had to watch as the Turkish soldiers slaughtered everyone in her life her parents, grandparents, brother and sisters. She was wounded and left for dead buried beneath the bodies of her family.
"I lay there for three days," Derderian, now living in the New York Armenian Home for the Aged in Flushing, said in an interview recounting that time in hell in a different place, a different century, as if it happened last Tuesday. "Everybody except me was dead. I had nobody, except God."
Helen Maralian was just 2 years old when the Turks murdered her parents and grandparents. She wound up in an orphanage after this first Holocaust of the 20th century. Although she was only 5 when she was put on a boat to come to America, she still remembers how she felt when she saw the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. "I was thrilled," she said. "We were coming to Gods country."
Aggie Ellian, the director of the Armenian Home, was lucky enough to be born 30 years after and an ocean away from the atrocities inflicted on her people, but, like the sons and daughters of survivors of the German version of genocide, she grew up hearing the stories. Actually, if she hadn’t, she may not have even known it happened. "Its not in the history textbooks," she said. "And even today, in America, politicians call it the alleged genocide."
Armenian-Americans from communities throughout Queens and the rest of the city are set to assemble in Times Square on Sunday, April 16 to mark the 85th anniversary of the crime. And there will be another commemoration starting at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 22 in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. (Transportation can be arranged by calling (212) 689-6273.)
Most of the survivors are too frail to come to these events. But George Vetzigian, 94, of Whitestone, is expected to come, as he has for other such commemorations since arriving in America in 1920. He always comes and sits up front and remembers.